


do not go gentle into that good night

by Lumiera



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Force Ghosts, Grandma of the Year Padmé Amidala, I reject JJ Abrams' reality and substitute it with my own, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Redeemed Ben Solo, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21891178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lumiera/pseuds/Lumiera
Summary: No,Padmé thinks, as clear as the Nabooian sky. She blinks back her tears, sets her jaw, and straightens her shoulders with the conviction of a queen.No,she vows again.Just this once, let my family have a happy ending.Just this once, let them live.* * *All seems lost, but Padmé is determined that Ben and Rey get to finish what she and Anakin started.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 191
Kudos: 1182
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	do not go gentle into that good night

All Force-users know this: the dead are not silent. They see, they remember, and sometimes, they speak.

Padmé remembers how it felt to die, and how it felt to watch her children—gentle golden-haired Luke and tiny Leia with a lion’s heart—grow up with what little she could give them; with a barely-there tug on their hands to help them up if they tripped and whisper-soft kisses grazing their foreheads as they slept.

She remembers, years later, watching Anakin gaze upon the face of his son with his own eyes, and she remembers how she filled with so much love that she thought she’d splinter apart at the seams as he walked into the light towards her, young again, _smiling_ again, his arms thrown wide open to gather her close once more.

She remembers Ben’s birth, and how she was there to see Leia sob in wonder as she held the red-faced, screaming bundle she’d at once named for hope, and she remembers how Ben never slept well without the sound of his father humming old spacefarers’ shanties, how he cried when his parents—who didn’t, _couldn’t_ understand—sent him away, and how he never really had a choice at all.

Now, she watches from the world that comes after.

It’s like she’s in a bad dream: Palpatine—because it was him all along, of course it was—lifts Ben as if he’s little more than a discarded toy and throws him into the abyss, and Leia lets out a hoarse scream that would rend any mother’s heart, but she still charges on with the others to help the girl, to urge her up, up, _up._ When she forces herself to rise, Rey of Jakku, that blazing-bright spark, turns Palpatine’s lightning back on him, but her wounds are too grave for a body that has known nothing but struggle. Vaguely, as Rey dies there on the dusty ground, Padmé is aware of her fellow spectres—her children; Han; Obi-Wan; Qui-Gon; Anakin; and brave, kind Shmi—and how they cry out or bend double with the pain of the loss.

And Ben—

—he climbs up, because no Solo ever did like being told the odds.

His body is broken. The fact that he’s able to _breathe,_ let alone stand and limp to sit by the girl’s side, is what people who don’t know the Force would call a miracle. He sees Rey’s blank, staring eyes, and Padmé gasps aloud as the ache ricochets through her chest.

Ben forgets that there is such a thing as pain as he cradles Rey like the gentlest of lovers. He noses her soft brown hair as though committing her scent and her still-there warmth to memory, and when his lips set in a determined line and his hand presses to her stomach, it’s then that Padmé understands what he’s going to do and what he’s going to give up.

The Force flows from his palm and into Rey in a trickle, then a stream, then a river, then an entire ocean of everything that Ben Solo is, was, and could ever be. It rushes into her bloodstream and commands her heart to beat and her lungs to heave in a shivery, shaky breath, which leaves her in a whisper of “Ben” before she surges up to kiss him. The girl has lived a life of hunger, and she’s starved in this, too. Ben’s frozen disbelief melts and he wastes no time: he clutches her so tightly that it almost seems like he wants to keep her safe within him or him safe within her, and when they break away, his dimpled, toothy grin is a picture-perfect mirror of his grandfather’s.

But it’s not right, and there’s nothing in the galaxy or the worlds beyond that could possibly make it right. Rey’s beaming, still, and she doesn’t— _can’t—_ know, not even as Ben’s full-body exhaustion wins and he slips from her embrace and out of the reach of her grasping fingers.

Once, long ago, a Skywalker fell to the Dark to save the life of the woman he loved. She died, and so did he—not on the second Death Star, but years before in the fires of Mustafar.

Once, a Skywalker rose to the Light to save the life of the woman he loved, and he won. He—this boy whose defiance shook the stars—challenged death to take it in her place.

 _No,_ Padmé thinks, as clear as the Nabooian sky. She blinks back her tears, sets her jaw, and straightens her shoulders with the conviction of a queen. _No,_ she vows again. _Just this once, let my family have a happy ending._

_Just this once, let them live._

Rey whimpers and folds herself over Ben, bunching the fabric of his black shirt in her fists as if hoping that this plea, this small, desperate gesture, will anchor him to her. Invisible, Padmé kneels beside them in a pool of her shimmery skirts and brushes through his tangle of hair with a fine-fingered hand. _In another life,_ she tells him, though she’s not certain if he can hear her, _I would have been there for you when you were sad, when you were scared, when you needed me the most._ She’d set out to do this alone, and yet she’s anything but. Anakin, Luke, Leia, Han, and the others arrange themselves around him, their unseen hands resting on his heart. _But this will have to do until it’s time for you to come with us—and not a moment before._

As the host of spirits channel energy into every crack in him, there’s the dimmest kindling of recognition in his dark, half-shut eyes. _I know you,_ it says, and he _does_. Before Palpatine found a way to block her and Anakin from Ben’s mind, she was there in his earliest childhood dreams, offering as much respite as she could. If Palpatine showed him a throne on a lightning-struck planet or a temple in ruins, she’d whisk him away to the Naboo she remembered, to the meadows and the lakes she’d adored.

She will remember this: the way the Force _sings_ when Ben gasps like a drowned man and jerks upright so suddenly that he almost knocks his forehead against Rey’s. She will remember how he laughs, then, looking so young and whole that she can’t envision for a split-second a universe without him in it. She will remember how, as the two of them stand and head towards Luke’s old X-wing, their hands stay intertwined. She will remember how they do not question the miracle that has restored them to one another.

Ben is with Rey, Ben is whole, and they survived.

Questions and their answers can wait.

* * *

All Force-users know this: the dead see what the living do not.

Rey and Ben land on Tatooine as the suns are setting, streaking vibrant flashes of colour against the sky, like the many paths blooming before Ben now.

Padmé sees them all.

She sees him staying in this old homestead with Rey, the two of them carving out a lifetime there.

She sees him on a jungle planet, meeting what remains of the Resistance as they figure out where they go from here. She sees the short woman with the glossy black hair beaming up at Ben, a dead man risen, because here is somebody else who knew to save what they loved.

She sees him making a home somewhere green, like Rey, desert-girl that she is, has always wanted, and if, in that life, Padmé sends him a dream of her family’s villa on Naboo just to nudge him along, who’s to blame her?

She sees him marrying Rey, one day, and how he cries as his wife takes his hand.

She sees him having children and having none. In one path, it’s a girl they bestow no legacy on but the name _Hope,_ and her eyes are forest-gold and her hair is as dark as a crow’s wing. In another, they adopt and fill their home with the empty-bellied, the lost, those who’d yearned to belong. In yet another, they decide to stay just Ben and Rey, and their laughter and love is what fills their home until it feels like the walls can barely contain it.

Most importantly, she sees him _happy,_ like her family should have been long ago.

**Author's Note:**

>  _The Rise of Skywalker_ broke my heart, and so I took a quick break from [my big WIP](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11935230/chapters/26978838) and wrote this little thing to fix it, because Padmé wouldn't stand for that ending either. I hope you liked it, too. ♥
> 
> Tumblr: [illumiera](https://illumiera.tumblr.com/).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [do not go gentle into that good night [PODFIC]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23375134) by [bessyboo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bessyboo/pseuds/bessyboo)




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